Catering orders are a goldmine for restaurants—high ticket averages, predictable revenue, and opportunities to build lasting guest relationships. But accept too many orders or cut lead times too short, and that goldmine becomes a minefield. Your kitchen gets slammed, quality suffers, and what should have been a profitable Thursday becomes a service failure your team—and your guests—won't forget.
The challenge isn't just about saying yes or no to orders. It's about knowing your operational limits and building systems that protect them. Traditional methods—spreadsheets tracking orders, handwritten prep lists, managers juggling phone calls from third-party marketplaces and walk-ins—break down the moment volume picks up.
However, the right technology can act as your capacity governor, automatically managing what you can handle while maximizing revenue opportunities. Here's how leading brands are preventing kitchen overload without leaving money on the table.
1. Lead Time Management: Give Your Team the Runway They Need
Crawl-walk-run
Not all restaurants are ready to handle same-day catering orders. And that's perfectly fine. I worked with one fast-casual brand that set a lead time of 48 hours when they first rolled out catering to give store teams time to train up on catering workflows, practice prep schedules, and build confidence. This also filtered out last-minute orders that would have overwhelmed an unprepared kitchen.
As teams got more comfortable, they gradually decreased that window. Now they can handle orders with much shorter notice—because they've built the operational muscle to support it.
Setting smart lead time requirements
Restaurants have two options for lead-time management, depending on which works better for their business.
Channel-level settings establish a baseline rule, like "All catering orders require 24 hours notice." This ensures kitchen teams have adequate prep time and can schedule staff appropriately during slower periods rather than scrambling during peak hours.
Menu item-level settings add granularity for specialty items. If you're a barbecue restaurant where ribs take 48 hours to smoke, you can set longer lead times for those specific items while keeping shorter windows for items like wings or sandwiches. This flexibility ensures you never promise what you can't deliver.
Bypass for VIPs
Sometimes you need to override lead time settings—a corporate client you can't afford to lose, a last-minute opportunity that's too good to pass up. Tools like Switchboard allow managers to place orders on behalf of guests and bypass standard lead times entirely. The key is making these exceptions intentionally, when you know you have the staff and ingredients on hand, rather than being forced into them by a system that doesn't give you control.
Seasonal adjustments
Smart operators also adjust lead times based on calendar realities. Heading into Thanksgiving, a sports event, or Valentine's Day? Extend your lead time window. This gives you more runway to prep for what will inevitably be your highest-volume days and helps you manage inventory when suppliers might be stretched thin (or when bird flu limits turkey availability, as one recent season demonstrated).
2. Order Throttling: Protect Your Peak Windows
Here's a scenario that keeps restaurant managers up at night: You have a 48-hour lead time, which sounds protective. But what happens when you receive 100 catering orders all scheduled for pickup during your busiest hours? Your lead time didn't fail—you just didn't have a mechanism to spread the load.
This is where throttling comes in. Throttling limits the number of orders you can accept within a specific time window. If you know you can handle 10 catering orders during a lunch rush but not 25, you set that limit. When orders exceed your threshold, guests are automatically offered alternative pickup times—maybe 3:30 PM or 5:00 PM instead.
You can also take control a step further with our rules engine. Brands can configure minimum lead times based on basket subtotal, ensuring that large, complex orders (e.g., over $500) are placed with enough advance notice for your kitchen to execute them perfectly.
Balancing catering with core operations
For QSR brands, this becomes especially critical. Some brands prioritize in-store guests and drive-thru traffic. Catering is important, but not at the expense of disappointing the guest waiting at the counter. Throttling helps ensure catering orders enhance revenue without compromising the core dining experience.
The beauty of throttling is that it's invisible to most guests. They simply see available time slots at checkout. But for your operations team, it's the difference between a manageable Friday and complete chaos.
3. Automated Production Sheets: Clarity for the Kitchen
The manual prep nightmare
Without automation, preparing multiple catering orders means printing individual tickets for each order, then manually calculating ingredient totals. If you have five orders that each need romaine lettuce, someone has to add up those quantities by hand. It's time-consuming, error-prone, and creates confusion on the line.
How production sheets work
In Olo, Production Sheet multiplies recipes for you. It takes all your incoming catering orders and generates consolidated prep lists that show exactly what you need—aggregated across all orders or broken down by individual order, depending on what your team needs.
At the aggregate level, production sheets help with ordering and inventory planning. You can see you need 50 pounds of flour for the week, not just for Tuesday's order. At the individual order level, they provide day-of guidance so your team knows exactly what goes into each catering package.
Flexible outputs for different workflows
Some kitchens prefer to batch prep ingredients across all orders. Others like to keep each catering order separate to minimize the risk of mixing up guest packages. Smart production sheet systems let you choose your own adventure—generating reports that match your actual kitchen workflow rather than forcing you to adapt to rigid software.
4. Unified Order Management: One Dashboard, Complete Visibility
Friction at login
Picture a typical catering manager's morning: Log into ezCater to check those orders. Log into your first-party ordering platform for direct orders. Check voicemail for call-in orders. Review the POS to see what's already been entered. Now, try to mentally combine all of this to understand your actual capacity for the day.
This fragmentation doesn't just waste time—it creates blind spots. When you can't see the complete picture in one place, you can't accurately assess whether you can handle one more order.
The power of integration
An integrated system automatically pulls in orders from ezCater, direct channels, and phone orders placed through tools like Switchboard, all into a single dashboard. You see real-time capacity across all channels. You know exactly what's coming, when it's due, and whether you have room for more.
This visibility extends to your fulfillment timelines as well. Staff can see accurate prep times and pickup windows without having to cross-reference multiple systems or make educated guesses.
Flexible order firing for last-minute changes
Another benefit of integration is flexible order firing logic. Rather than sending orders to your POS immediately when they're placed (which makes them difficult to modify), you can delay firing until later—say, 11 PM the night before. This gives you a window to make adjustments if a guest calls with changes, without having to refund and recreate entire orders.
Technology as Your Growth Enabler
The competitive advantage in catering isn't just about accepting more orders—it's about delivering consistently on the orders you accept. When guests know they can rely on you, they become repeat clients. When they experience missed deadlines, wrong quantities, or quality issues because your kitchen was overloaded, they don't come back.
Smart capacity management technology acts as your governor, not your growth limiter. It helps you say yes to the right orders at the right times while protecting your operation from the chaos of overcommitment.
Start by auditing your current pain points. Are last-minute orders disrupting your prep schedule? Are certain time windows consistently overwhelming your kitchen? Are staff spending hours manually consolidating prep lists? Each of these challenges has a technical solution that leading brands are already using.
The brands winning at catering aren't necessarily the ones with the biggest kitchens—they're the ones with the smartest systems.
Looking for more proven strategies to grow catering? Check out our Catering Growth Playbook, with practical tips for beginning or advanced programs.
Or, watch our Catering 101 webinar with Bojangles and CRUMBS to learn how to transform sporadic orders into consistent revenue.
